Crown of Thorns (Nick Barrett Charleston series)

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Contents

  front pages

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Lies of Saints excerpt

  Crown of Thorns

  Copyright © 2002 by Sigmund Brouwer. All rights reserved.

  Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom

  of heaven.

  Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

  Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

  Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall

  be filled.

  Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

  Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

  Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

  Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

  Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven . . .

  Matthew 5:3-12,

  KING JAMES VERSION

  Prologue

  With her feet barely touching the ground, Angel sat on a weather- faded granite headstone in the corner of the cemetery. A ghostly white full moon—so appropriate for the nearby activity—was bright enough to cast crisp tiny shadows in the lettering of some of the newly engraved headstones beside her.

  Two large black men, cajoled from a bar just before closing time, were shoveling aside the heavy soft dirt of a Charleston graveyard.

  “This gives me the creepie-crawlies, I ain’t afraid to tell you.” The man on the left paused, fully sober now. His sleeves were rolled up and, in daylight, Angel would have seen rough prison tattoos beneath a sheen of sweat on his powerful forearms. “I couldn’t hardly dare walk through here in daylight, let alone—”

  “Keep digging, man,” his partner replied. He pointed his shovel at the coffin beside them. “You don’t want to go how this one did. Messing with Grammie Zora is a quick one-way trip into the ground. She ain’t the queen of voodoo for nothing.”

  The first speaker shivered, although the night was warm. “Wonder how it was the spell got ’im.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t wanna know. And if you was wise, you wouldn’t wanna know either. Could be some spells rub off from one person to the next. And Grammie Zora, she casts a powerful spell. Which is the plain reason I’m digging and not asking questions.”

  “I’m diggin’. I’m diggin’.”

  From her nearby vantage point, Angel surveyed them in silence, well aware of the potency of their fears. Grammie Zora did indeed have great power. An hour earlier, just after midnight, Angel had visited one of Grammie’s longtime clients, a mortician who showed up at least once every six months to request a curse be placed on his competition. On the mortician’s doorstep, Angel had delivered Grammie’s request, and the mortician had not hesitated to load an empty coffin into his hearse and drive through the dark city streets to pick up a sheet-wrapped body lying in the unkempt grass behind Grammie Zora’s house.

  “There won’t be no questions about this,” Angel had promised the mortician, who had immediately begun to tremble at the sight of the eerily still recipient of one of Grammie’s blackest spells. It wasn’t the still body that gave him fear; he earned his family’s bread by dealing with dead bodies. It was Grammie Zora’s power over the supernatural, shown so plainly in this world by her effect on this victim.

  Angel had watched the mortician nervously rub one hand against the other and had continued to speak quietly. “Grammie Zora’s already on a bus going far away,” she had told him, “just in case police ever want to ask any questions. And she’ll be gone a while. But Grammie Zora said there won’t be no questions. You can bet on that. Grammie Zora says she’ll place some blessings on those who help, but those who don’t, they might just end up wrapped in a sheet just like this. And besides, Grammie Zora says no one is going to come looking for this body because she promises no one is going to report this dead person missing because it was all part of the spell and you don’t want to mess with that kind of power.”

  She’d helped him lift the wrapped body into the cheap coffin, and the mortician had taken the coffin to a nearby cemetery, one that held countless bodies of the poor and the black, bodies cared about only by other poor and black. Those in power, the rich and the white, gave this corner of Charleston little attention and even

  if they did, it was a place that the mortician knew held such sloppy administration records that no one would ever know that this new plot hadn’t been registered. As Angel had told the mortician in her matter-of-fact and mature-beyond-her-years voice, the best place to hide a marble was in a bagful of other marbles.

  If Grammie Zora’s power had worked on the mortician through Angel, then this same power had in turn worked on the gravediggers through the mortician. Even though he’d picked them up at their favorite bar on a payday night. Even though the furtive burial meant they’d been forced to use shovels to dig instead of a backhoe.

  So it was that Angel now supervised the two gravediggers, the mortician and his hearse long gone.

  At 5 A.M., the gravediggers finished the hole. Not as deep as it should have been, but with daylight approaching, deep enough. The men lowered the coffin without ceremony and began to pile dirt on the coffin.

  “Never knew dirt could be so loud,” one said to the other, as the clumps echoed on the top of the coffin. “It’s enough to wake up the dead.”

  “The dead don’t wake.” The reply was so quick and savage that the first gravedigger understood his partner’s unspoken words. Finish the job, man, and don’t look back.

  Just before dawn, they were on their knees, carefully replacing the sod. The buried body was now safely hidden among all the others gone to their eternal sleep. When the gravediggers stood, Angel pushed herself off the headstone that had served as her chair during her patient vigil. Hands on her hips, she faced them, a small girl almost twelve years old.

  “Grammie Zora thanks you for this,” Angel said. “Someday, when you need a favor, all you need to do is ask. If she ain’t back yet from where she’s gone, don’t worry none. Just ask me. I’ll make sure she gets the message. She’ll treat you fine. I can

  promise you that. Just fine.”

  Angel paused. “Unless, of course, you tell anyone about this night. Then there will be a couple of others burying you, same way you buried this one. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes ma’am,” they both said as if they were speaking to Grammie Zora herself. One, unaware of the irony of pitting one faith against another, made the feeble effort of crossing himself
<
br />   as he’d seen priests do on television. “Yes ma’am, indeed.”

  Chapter 1

  As a child, I knew well the greatest tragedy of the Larrabee family, for many around me were happy to openly speculate on its delicious horror. This was the tale of the thunder-filled night that young Timothy Larrabee delivered a potion of death to his grandmother.

  Indeed, most of Charleston’s proper families are haunted by the tales of eccentricity and madness and scandal and deviances of previous generations, tales flaunted with proud defiance in the way that the once rich will cling to ancient and fading silks even as they are reduced to begging. These tales circulate among the other proper families, so that all of us among the self-crowned aristocracy of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation Charlestonians each know the shrouded heritage of the others.

  The legacy of the Larrabee family was no different, as its members could count among their ancestors the regular assortment of rogues and idiots, ranging from pirates and slave traders to cowards and heroes of the war of Northern aggression, imposed upon the South by Lincoln.

  But it was Timothy Larrabee who achieved the most notoriety among all the scandals in the two-hundred-year recorded history of the Larrabee family. This story was not even a generation old at the time of my childhood, so it was treated as recent gossip, and it was not difficult for me to imagine how it happened.

  He was only ten the night it occurred, slender and constantly aware of his grooming in clothing and heritage, and had already learned to carry himself with great elegance and to speak with perfect clarity, as if constantly and consciously rehearsing a style of delivering future edicts that would be firmly obeyed once he took official reign of the Larrabee dynasty—even though the dynasty had dwindled to his grandmother, himself, and the vastly reduced fortune that had once bolstered their family name. It

  was with this great elegance that he stepped into the bedroom

  of Agnes Larrabee that night, in a mansion two streets over from the similar mansion that would become my childhood prison, and roughly a decade before I was born.

  I have been told it was his habit to wear a tailored, freshly pressed double-breasted black suit, and that he greased his hair back Gatsby-style to add maturity to his precocious appearance. As on all other evenings, he approached his grandmother’s poster bed where she sat waiting in a white dressing gown, propped against a half dozen pillows. Timothy Larrabee looked like a tiny adult as he crossed the hardwood floor and Persian throw rug, balancing in his white-gloved hands a polished silver tray with shortbread biscuits and a gold-rimmed china cup filled with densely sweetened Earl Grey tea. The sweetness of the hot tea, the delivery of the tray, and the manner in which Timothy was dressed to perform his task were part of a nightly ritual that Agnes demanded in the Larrabee household. Timothy Larrabee did not see it as a burden, for young as he was, Timothy Larrabee had been well taught to respect ritual and tradition and all the power they would bestow upon him in adulthood.

  On this evening, as on all others, Timothy Larrabee had taken the tray in the kitchen from Samson Elias, the lifelong family servant who prepared it nightly. This was the same servant subsequently accused of stealing from the Larrabee family a seventeenth-century miniature portrait of King Charles I, father of the namesake of Charleston. This was the same servant accused of the murder of Agnes Larrabee, convicted and sentenced to execution despite his advanced age.

  Because on this night, the sweetness of the tea in the gold-rimmed china cup disguised the taste of enough rat poison to kill a horse. Among the unkind whispers that followed her death was the observation that the dosage was so strong simply because Samson Elias knew well that Agnes Larrabee had the meanness of temperament and constitution that would have survived any less.

  Sheet lightning cracked the darkness of the rains that pounded the bedroom window as Timothy Larrabee glided forward with his tray and waited for his grandmother’s approval of his manners and presentation before setting the tray on a nightstand. With those white-gloved hands, he passed her the gold-rimmed cup that would deliver death.

  Perhaps as Agnes Larrabee took that first gulp of cooling tea, she did taste some of the bitterness of the poison. But a well-bred Charlestonian simply does not spew as lesser creatures might. So it was that Agnes Larrabee swallowed her death potion with as much dignity as she could manage, and within minutes died beneath a down-filled duvet, clutching the gold crucifix on the chain around her neck and calling out the name of Jesus, her cries of agony lost in the crashing thunder and the rain that poured upon her mansion.

  It has been commonly maintained that Timothy’s downward spiral into juvenile delinquency and subsequent years in federal prison resulted from the terrible combination of innocently delivering the instrument of his grandmother’s death and then watching her die in such a horrible manner.

  Yet I now know that what I believed about Timothy Larrabee as I grew up in Charleston was only a small part of the whole truth.

  For the childhood that broke him held other stories.

  Far more secret.

  And far worse.

  Chapter 2

  Nearly five decades after Agnes Larrabee’s murder by poisoning, two friends who owned an antique shop on King Street presented me with a request: Meet with a young girl from a part of Charleston known for bodies occasionally being found in alleys, and ask her how and why she possessed the nearly four-hundred-year-old painting stolen by Samson Elias on that thunder-filled night when Agnes Larrabee died in her bed.

  It was summer, and I had recently returned to Charleston after years of self-imposed exile. My job as an instructor of astronomy at a community college in New Mexico meant I had a few months to myself, which gave me too many hours to fill each day, and enough income that I didn’t need to work.

  My daily routine held little excitement. At seven-thirty, I would leave the Doubletree Suites that overlooked the market and walk to my morning breakfast at the Sweetwater Café on Market Street. From there I would make the short walk to King, turn left, and visit those two friends at an antique shop a few blocks south toward Broad. I would not outstay my daily welcome, however, and I made sure I departed for the South Carolina Archives on Meeting Street well before my friends began to fidget with impatience. In a chair in the corner of the archives, I would indulge my interest in local history, reading until my vision began to blur. At that point—although I knew

  I would get nothing but an exasperated sigh from my attorney—

  I would leave the archives to call from my cell phone and inquire about the lack of progress in our ongoing court battle for my part of the family fortune, which pitted me against my half brother, Pendleton. Then would come my daily workout in the hotel fitness center and another evening alone in my hotel room after

  a solitary dinner at one of the restaurants in the market area.

  One of the dangers of enduring long idle hours is that friends think you won’t mind doing them a favor that requires little more than time. Another is the accuracy of their guess, as well as the eagerness with which you will tend to accept such a request. And

  a third hazard, among all the other seductions that come with idle hours, is that the sense of purpose that comes from such a request will lead you to go to extraordinary and senseless efforts to fulfill it.

  Because of this, when my friends asked me to find out more about the resurfaced painting, I agreed.

  With no premonition of how such a simple request would change the direction of my life.

  **

  I had arrived inside the emergency room at St. George’s Hospital just before a cabdriver and his two passengers. The sliding-glass doors closed with a whoosh behind them as I settled into a chair in the waiting room near the entrance. The air-conditioning was a welcome relief to the high humidity outside.

  It was noon, Saturday. At this time of day, the waiting area to the emergency room had no late-night drunks or midnight stabbings to cause confusion. A sitcom played on the te
levision set mounted from the ceiling in the corner. A security guard in an olive uniform stood at bored inattention near the reception area.

  “I don’t like this, you making me come inside to collect my fare,” the cabdriver said. His voice carried clearly in the quiet as

  I listened nearby, unnoticed by him or his two passengers. “For me, time is money. I should already be picking up my next ride.”

  Short and broad and easily within range of retirement, he wore gray work pants and a sweater of matching color, although the sweater had likely once been white. The sweater stretched tight on his belly, and greasy hair hung in strings below his ball cap.

  “I told you, my hands are full. As soon as I can give Maddie to someone, I’ll pay.”

  I knew this was Angel from the information my friends had given me. She had skin of light cocoa, wide green eyes, a ball cap of her own, and short dark hair that she might have scissored herself. Maybe eleven or twelve years old, she seemed far too frail in a pair of baggy overalls that looked like Salvation Army castoffs, but there was the toughness of endured hunger in her skinny face.

  Maddie probably wasn’t even two years old. She was riding Angel’s hip and clinging hard to Angel’s thin upper body, her face showing the sheen of fever, her eyes closed tight against unuttered pain.

  Unaware of how closely I was listening, the cabbie snarled. “I’m telling you again, time’s money.”

  Guys who play it tough with preadolescent girls don’t impress me. From where I sat, I could smell the mixture of rancid sweat and stale Old Spice on his gray sweater. “I’ll take her while you dig out the roll you showed me before,” he said, “unless you want me to go back out there and start the meter again.”

  Angel wrinkled her nose. I could only guess that she had gotten wind of the cabbie’s body odor too. Her eyes fell on me, sitting close by. I tend toward blue jeans and black golf shirts on the theory that, at my height, darker colors hide a least ten pounds of extra weight. Today was no different. I hadn’t bothered to shave in a few days, and the beginnings of my dark beard had traces of gray. I’m not sure mine was the kind of face to inspire instant trust. Nor did I think any white man past thirty years of age would have seemed like much of a choice to a girl of her age and background. Compared to the cabbie, however, I had showered and my clothes were freshly laundered, so I probably looked like a better bet to her than he did.